Blas Roca Calderio (24 July 1908 – 25 April 1987) was a Cuban politician and Marxist theorist who served as President of the National Assembly of People's Power from 1976 to 1981.

Blas Roca, born Francisco Wilfredo Calderío López in Manzanillo, left school at the age of 11 and began shining shoes to help support his poor family.

During this stage he displayed significant journalistic activity in the labor press and led popular protests that culminated in the historic general strike of August 1933, which overthrew the Machado dictatorship.

In August 1935, Blas Roca attended the 7th Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, where Georgi Dimitrov outlined what became the new popular front strategy.

Under Blas Roca's direction, Cuba's communist party grew in size and influence with key control over trade unions and other support organizations.

Support for the party was strongest among Cuban intellectuals and artists, and counted among its members and sympathizers such notable Cubans as the novelist Alejo Carpentier, the poet Juan Marinello, who served as the party's chair, the painter Wifredo Lam, the national poet Nicolás Guillén, the writers Félix Pita Rodríguez, Mirta Aguirre, and Pablo de la Torriente Brau, and the economists Jacinto Torres and Raúl Cepero Bonilla.

As the party's ability to operate openly was blocked, key leaders began to rethink their attitude towards Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement and the strategy of armed struggle.

Blas Roca told the Eighth National Assembly of the PSP in August 1960: ″We rightly foresaw, and greatly looked forward to, the prospect that in response to conditions created by the tyranny, the masses would organize and eventually engage in armed struggle or popular insurrection.

But for a long time we failed to take any practical steps to hasten that prospect, because we believed that these struggles, including a prolonged general strike, would culminate in armed insurrection quite spontaneously.

Fidel Castro's historical merit is that he prepared, trained, and assembled the fighting elements needed to begin and carry on armed struggle as a means of destroying the tyranny.″[4] Under Roca's leadership the Cuban communists were instrumental in providing an organizational and ideological structure for Castro's socialist revolution as well as playing a pivotal role using the party's long-standing ties with the Soviet Union to promote increasingly closer ties during the early days of the revolution.